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Court: Hutterites must pay workers' compensation
Attorney News |
2013/01/09 05:25
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A sharply divided Montana Supreme Court has ruled that forcing a Hutterite religious colony to pay workers' compensation insurance for jobs outside the commune is not an unconstitutional intrusion into religion.
The 4-3 decision upholds a 2009 law requiring religious organizations to carry workers' compensation insurance, which the Legislature passed after businesses complained they could not outbid the religious workers.
The Big Sky Colony of Hutterites in northwestern Montana sued, saying the law targeted its religion and infringed on its beliefs. Its members have no personal property and make no wages as part of their communal life, which is central to their religious beliefs, and a member can't make a claim against the colony or take money for himself without risking excommunication.
The Hutterites are Protestants similar to the Amish and Mennonites who live a life centered on their religion. But unlike the others, Hutterites live in German-speaking communes scattered across northern U.S. states and Canada. They are primarily agricultural producers but have expanded into construction with success because they can offer lower job bids than many private businesses.
Justice Brian Morris, writing for the majority, said the workers' compensation requirement does not interfere with the Hutterites' religious practices but only regulates their commercial activities like any other business. |
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Convicted financier says he can't afford a lawyer
Court Watch |
2012/12/19 08:03
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An Indiana financier and former chief executive of National Lampoon who was convicted of swindling investors out of about $200 million says he can't afford to hire an attorney to handle his appeal.
In federal court documents filed Monday, Timothy Durham said his multimillion-dollar Indianapolis home is in foreclosure and all of his financial assets are tied up bankruptcy proceedings of the companies he used to control.
Durham's home in Fortville, Ind., about 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis, has a $5 million mortgage but a free-market value of only $3 million, according to the documents.
Durham says his only income this year was $6,000 he received as a director of Dallas-based insurer CLST Holdings Inc. He also has stock in CLST and National Lampoon, the documents say.
Durham was sentenced to 50 years in prison last month on securities fraud and other convictions in the collapse of Akron, Ohio-based Fair Finance. He also was ordered to pay $202.8 million in restitution. Durham received credit for $6 million that already has been recovered.
Durham and two business partners were charged with stripping Fair Finance of its assets and using the money to buy mansions, classic cars and other luxury items and to keep another Durham company afloat. The men were convicted of operating an elaborate Ponzi scheme to hide the company's depleted condition from regulators and investors, many of whom were elderly.
Defense lawyers argued that Durham and the others were caught off-guard by the economic crisis of 2008, and bewildered when regulators placed them under more strict scrutiny and investors made a run on the company. |
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High Court to decide how logging roads regulated
Attorney News |
2012/12/11 07:05
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The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to switch gears on more than 30 years of regulating the muddy water running off logging roads into rivers.
At issue: Should the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency keep considering it the same as water running off a farm field, or start looking at it like a pipe coming out of a factory?
The case being heard Monday in Washington, D.C., was originated by a small environmental group in Portland, the Northwest Environmental Defense Center.
It sued the Oregon Department of Forestry over roads on the Tillamook State Forest that drain into salmon streams. The lawsuit argued that the Clean Water Act specifically says water running through the kinds of ditches and culverts built to handle storm water runoff from logging roads is a point source of pollution when it flows directly into a river, and requires the same sort of permit that a factory needs.
"We brought this out of a perceived sense of unfairness," said Mark Riskedahl, director of the center. "Every other industrial sector across the country had to get this sort of permit for stormwater discharge," and the process has been very effective at reducing pollution.
The pollution running off logging roads, most of them gravel or dirt, is primarily muddy water stirred up by trucks. Experts have long identified sediment dumped in streams as harmful to salmon and other fish.
The center lost in U.S. District Court in Portland, but won in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The Oregon Department of Forestry and Georgia Pacific-West appealed to the Supreme Court, and 31 states threw in with them. |
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Minn. gay couple in '71 marriage case still united
Court Watch |
2012/12/10 20:46
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When Jack Baker proposed to Michael McConnell that they join their lives together as a couple, in March 1967, McConnell accepted with a condition that was utterly radical for its time: that someday they would legally marry.
Just a few years later, the U.S. Supreme Court slammed the door on the men's Minnesota lawsuit to be the first same-sex couple to legally marry in the U.S. It took another 40 years for the nation's highest court to revisit gay marriage rights, and Baker and McConnell — still together, still living in Minneapolis — are alive to see it.
On Friday, the justices decided to take a potentially historic look at gay marriage by agreeing to hear two cases that challenge official discrimination against gay Americans either by forbidding them from marrying or denying those who can marry legally the right to obtain federal benefits that are available to heterosexual married couples.
"The outcome was never in doubt because the conclusion was intuitively obvious to a first-year law student," Baker wrote in an email to The Associated Press. The couple, who have kept a low profile in the years since they made national headlines with their marriage pursuit, declined an interview request but responded to a few questions via email.
While Baker saw the court's action as an obvious step, marriage between two men was nearly unthinkable to most Americans decades earlier when the couple walked into the Hennepin County courthouse in Minneapolis on May 18, 1970, and tried to get a license. |
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Pentagon lawyer: War on terror not endless
Legal News |
2012/12/04 00:20
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The war on terror is not an endless conflict and the U.S. is approaching a "tipping point" after which the military fight against al-Qaida will be replaced by a law enforcement and intelligence operation, the Pentagon's top lawyer has said.
Jeh Johnson told an audience at Oxford University that the core of al-Qaida is "degraded, disorganized and on the run," according to a transcript of Friday's speech.
Johnson, general counsel to the U.S. Defense Department, said that once most al-Qaida members are captured or killed, armed conflict would be replaced by "a counterterrorism effort against individuals" led by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
His speech to the Oxford Union debating society marked rare public comments by a senior U.S. official about the end of the armed conflict launched after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Shortly after 9/11, U.S. legislators passed a law that essentially granted the White House open-ended authority for armed action against al-Qaida.
Despite a promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for terror suspects, President Barack Obama has largely carried forward the anti-terrorism policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. He authorized the raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and has expanded the use of unmanned drone strikes against targets in Pakistan and Yemen. |
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